I posted this on a different blog, so this feels a bit like cheating. Oh well:

As a white lady who has recently decided her life’s calling is racial justice work, I spend a lot of time thinking about how my knowledge of race issues, necessarily, comes second-hand. I spend a lot of time wondering whether I, as a white person, am the right sort of person to be inserting my voice on something I don’t have real experience with, whether I shouldn’t just leave all the racism talk to those who know these issues first-hand instead of from books and college courses. Some folks have told me as much, saying Critical Race Theory is just another way for white people to self-righteously act like they know what’s best for people of color.

It’s not enough to say that whites have more power and capital, and therefore the anti-racist cause needs white people working on it in order to be successful. That belittles the power people of color do have, and makes it seem like the role of white anti-racists is to speak on behalf of people of color—as if the goal is to silence their voices further by completely replacing them with our own.

So on the one hand, I don’t want to speak on anyone’s behalf, and on the other hand, I’m wary of falling into “white guilt” and just doing nothing. In the middle is this place where I can work my ass off for justice and be proud and secure in who I am and what I’m doing. That’s what I’m working to find.

I think it lies in acknowledging fully what it means to be white—something white people aren’t forced to think about, but is crucial to fully understanding exactly where my place is in this work.

Being white means never having to apologize.

It means getting to blame people of color for their own predicament.

It means believing in, and usually defining yourself by, a pretend meritocracy.

Being white means having to learn, in school usually, to see things that others feel viscerally from as early as they can remember.

That’s the thing. Being white doesn’t make me less qualified to fight racism. Isn’t racism a white problem? Taking classes on race issues doesn’t mean I know more than people of color—it means I now understand that to expect people of color to solve racism is to ask them to fix white peoples’ problem. The problems of never feeling like you have to apologize, of having to go to school to discover, in your twenties, the very basis on which our society operates, the problem of blaming people of color for their own predicament—these are white people’s problems. Something we have the responsibility to fix. When people of color devote themselves to this problem, it’s a generous, valuable choice and a crucial contribution. But for whites to expect that of every person of color, or to bow out of conversations because we don’t know first-hand the experiences of people of color, is to take advantage of the agency they do have and expect them to put it all to use to fix our own pathologies.

In short, being white means having the responsibility to redefine what being white means.